Thursday, April 26, 2012

I've been writing for my supper long before anyone paid me to make stuff up as a novelist (though I suppose one could argue I've made stuff up both as a journalist and a marketing geek, but I digress).

Not long ago, I was handed a block of text and asked to jazz it up a little. The copy was surprisingly well-written, until I got to the word "impactful."

I'd never seen it before, so I did some googling (pausing long enough to appreciate that "googling" has become a verb). A quick visit to urbandictionary.com confirmed what I suspected:

Impactful: A non-existent word coined by corporate advertising, marketing and
business drones to make their work sound far more useful, exciting and
beneficial to humanity than it really is. This term is most frequently
used in team building seminars and conferences in which said drones
discuss the most effective ways to convince consumer zombies to purchase
crap they clearly do not need or even want.

I shared my findings with the boss, fully expecting pushback (depending on the dictionary you consult, "pushback" isn't a word, either). After all, I once worked for CEO who was informed that a word he kept using didn't exist. Unconcerned, he had it emblazoned on an enormous plaque in the lobby.

But lucky for me, the boss who suggested "impactful" took things in stride.

"It may not be a real word," he said, "but it should be."

I can't argue with that.

One of my favorite words in the English language is "crazynuts." I'm reminded daily by my iPhone, my email program, and the spellcheck function in my word processing software that "crazynuts" is not a real word.

I don't care.

Because sometimes, there's no better way to tell my gentleman friend how I feel than to say I'm crazynuts about him. If an acquaintance is acting particularly wackadoo (one of my agent's favorite fake words), I can think of no better word to describe the behavior than crazynuts.

Incidentally, while crafting this blog post, I was in the middle of an email exchange with my agent and the publisher of my interactive fiction title, Getting Dumped. When someone used the words "romancy" and "mystery-y," it was all I could do to keep from shrieking, my point exactly!

Do you have a favorite non-word you firmly believe should be a real word? Please share!

And since I haven't given out a free book for awhile, how about I award a signed copy of Believe it or Not to the person with the best fake word?

Share and define your favorite made-up word in the comments, and tell me why it should be a real word. I'll pick a winner at noon on Sunday, April 29 and will announce it in next Monday's post.

My favorite made-up word is Fantabulous. It looses the Fabulous that make the thing sound made up and the Fantastic that makes it sound made up and comes up with a word that sound like more than the normal person gets to experience. Fantabulous. It was fantabulous. Replaces Awesome as a work describing the totally wonderful and hard to believe.

Your books are Fantabulous. Can't wait for the next and kind of with I had a Kindle so I could read Getting Dumped..

Diangulate: To position yourself diagonally on a bed so as to make it impossible for others to join you. Usually occurs at midnight when you get up to go to the bathroom (peepulate) and come back to find the husband has repositioned.

Someone I work with regularly uses the word "gregacious" to describe enthusiastic, energetic, sociable people, particularly women. I believe it's a combination of vivacious and gregarious, and I'm pretty sure he has no idea that it's not a real word - and I'm not going to be the one to tell him, that's for sure!

One of my favorite made up words is WTFery. Not only is it phony texting lingo, it's a word too! I first saw it over at Smart Bitches Trashy Books, where they use it as a tag. It's perfectly appropriate. I can think of lots of things in various romances I've read that can only be categorized as WTFery.

Well, when I started my own blog I coined a term, Fictzophrenic and Fictzophrenia. I even put them in urbandictionary, because I'm that big of a nerd. To my way of thinking a fictzophrenic is a person who hears the voices of their characters and then writes about them. In other words, a writer of fiction.

I have two, which I use all the time, created by my husband and his siblings in their childhood. The first is "qua-nong" (alternately spelled "cue-nong"). It's derived from the sound effect that occurs when something dramatic or surprising occurs on classic episodes of Star Trek. Our current usage:

"The bathroom door wasn't locked, and I ended up walking in on someone!""Qua-nong!"

The other word is kirchkening, which is meant to represent teeth chattering.

Usage:

"Wow, it's kirchkening in here. Turn up the heat!"

OR

"I almost got into a car accident this afternoon!""Yikes! That's pretty kirchkening!"

I'm posting again because my son reminded me of his favorite made up word: "froddity" (as in, frozen oddity.) It's the part of the ice cream that gets weird when you leave the container out on the counter and then refreeze it.

Usage: "Hey, mom, can you give Luke the froddity? He just drowns it in chocolate sauce anyway."

My favorite one is "sweettitties" I say it about everything, found an awesome upfront parking spot? SweetTitties! Found my favorite, never on the shelves wine? SweetTititties! Ball-sack is another favorite, bad parking spot? Ballsack. Of course this is a real word, but I'm sure it was not designed for the purpose of cursing out a bad parking spot. But it works, all that matters.